Where are the northern Innovators?

John Popham is looking for a list of regional radicals, to make up for the London-weighting in the UK's image of where enterprise is to be found

The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate 2011. David Hockney is a brilliant artist, innovative businessman and notable transformer of old northern images. There must be another 49 such around. David Hockney Photograph: David Hockney

When the coalition government first started talking about its Big Society policy, there were those of us who warned this was not good news for the north of England.

Although Localism, the policy which has largely taken over from most of the Big Society rhetoric due to the latter's lack of resonance with the public, theoretically is about devolving power to local people, I have frequently argued that there is a big difference between helping people to help themselves, and leaving people to help themselves.

This is what led a number of us to get together to form an organisation called Big Society in the North. Localism is all very well as a concept, but, when allied to large scale public spending cuts and the dismantling of regional support structures, it is a potential recipe for leaving disadvantaged communities to spiral into further decline.

Big Society in the North evolved into Our Society, a national (unresourced) support network for those involved in local people-led development. This became inevitable because the clamour to get involved from those outside the north became too great, and it was increasingly evident that communities in Hackney, Shoreditch, Dudley, Bristol and Leicester, were suffering similarly from spending cuts to those in the North. But the original motivation remains.

Public sector employment makes up a bigger proportion of the totality of jobs in the north; public spending is disproportionately important to local economies in the north; and the further you get from London, the more difficult it is to attract the attention of the centralised (English) state. This latter point is being felt all the more acutely since the dismantling of regional structures such as Government Regional Offices and Regional Development Agencies.

Whatever you think of how effective such agencies were, they were organisations charged with speaking up for their regions and channelling resources away from London. That is not now happening. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their devolved structures. The north of England, further away from London than some parts of Wales, no longer has powerful bodies speaking up for it. There is a vacuum which has yet to be filled by powerful enough self-organised structures.

Last week there were two announcements which confirmed to me the effect that centralisation of policy-making is having. The first was the declaration of the initial round of recipients of the Cabinet Office Innovation in Giving Fund, which included a clear majority of organisations based in London. The second was the announcement by The Observer and NESTA of the list of 50 New Radicals, the "inspirational Britons improving the lives of people and communities across the country in radical and creative ways".

Now, while this is undoubtedly a list of people doing amazing things, and is well worth looking at for replicating good ideas, I find it profoundly depressing that the website for the list declares that 50% of the radicals are based in London, and it is obvious that a fair proportion of the rest are not too far away from the capital. Population alone dictates that a fair proportion of the participants in any initiative will be London-based, but the 50 New Radicals initiatives published a map showing the locations of those it celebrates, and there are some very big gaps there.

The 50 New Radicals initiative is particularly interesting in this respect. It celebrates self-starters who are making things happen. And, it explicitly declares that this is happening "across the country". But, one glance at the map opens this assertion up to challenge.

Now, there are many who argue that entrepreneurship and enterprise are rare commodities in the north of England, I've done it myself when writing funding and project applications. The high levels of public sector employment, the legacy of paternalistic industries such as coal mining and steel manufacture, the relative lack of big company headquarters, and lower levels of business startup, have all been cited as evidence that the north lacks an entrepreneurial tradition.

But, on the other hand, the birth of the co-operative movement in Rochdale, some of the collective and collaborative initiatives which emerged from the 1980's miners' strike, and beacons like Incredible Edible Todmorden, one of the few 50 New Radicals based in northern England, show that the north has particular ways of being entrepreneurial; ways which are especially relevant in these austere times. And, if you need your entrepreneurship to have celebrity endorsement, you need to look no further than the Dragons' Den duo of Bolton's Hilary Devey and Duncan Bannatyne, a Scotsman whose business interests are based in County Durham. Two of Lord Sugar's seven successful apprentices were born in Hull.

Lord Sugar. Hull has answered his call. Photo: BBC/Talkback Thames

There is no shortage of enterprise in the North, but the London-based policy-makers often seem to have a problem crossing the M25 or venturing beyond the end of the tube lines to find it.

This is not a rant about entitlement. It is great to see all those London-based projects being celebrated, but we need to cheer about what northerners are doing too. There is a real danger that these things turn into self-fulfilling prophecies and further reinforce the impression that all good ideas emanate from the capital. I myself have been part of discussions which take place in London and are assumed to encompass the whole country's point of view, when I've been the only non-Londoner present. And how many important announcements are made at breakfast meetings in Westminster or close by?

In the age of the internet it should not matter where you are based, but all too few of the agencies which make decisions about these initiatives are making full use of it to overcome issues of geography.

So the time has come for the innovators of the north to stand up and make themselves heard. Let's have our own list of Northern Radicals, and I bet we can find more than 50 of them. London-based agencies must realise they risk deepening the north-south divide if they fail to look beyond the horizon. And, until the day comes when those who hold the purse strings recognise what they are missing out on in our northern heartlands, where are the charities, foundations, and pension funds who are going to back our northern initiative?